Hey, welcome back to the Life Coach Launchpad. My name’s BJ, and I’m here every week talking to you about all the online business things that, as it turns out, need to happen in order to have a successful life coaching business. I’m a business coach. I love to help life coaches make more money, get more clients, have more fun, and to do what they love to do, what they’re meant to do, and that’s coaching.

So let’s dive right in This is the third and final Part episode of the mini series of the outside business forces that can actually affect your life coaching business I’m going to start with the takeaways from this episode in the previous two episodes in this mini series on What are honestly the very few outside business forces that have had a significant change in?

My coaching business and that of my clients Really, there’s been three, three total in five years that I’ve been coaching and doing done for you services for my clients who are life coaches. The reason why I keep mentioning that it’s only three over five years is because there’s so much chatter and About Google search algorithm changes, social media algorithm changes, Facebook ad updates, and so on.

All of those really are just blips in the grand scheme of what you as a life coach need to be doing at all times. Your goal should be to further understand the challenges your potential clients are going through and offer advice, tools, information that can help them. All the algorithms are actually geared to help you get through to them if you are actually trying to help.

The first episode, it was, so that was two episodes ago, was about when Apple changed which podcast episodes it downloads. Net, there was a significant drop in podcast downloads. Back in the fall of 2023 across the board, the second episode in this mini series, which was the one right before this was about when Apple mail started sending information back to the email marketing softwares saying that every email that went through it was opened, whether it was opened by the user or not the net result.

Is that everyone saw their email open rates go way up. I was working with a client at the time that saw her open rates double in one month. Double. At first it sounded great. But then we learned more and it just wasn’t what we thought it was. If either of those situations are new to you, go back and listen to the episodes immediately before this one and two before this one.

I also have the information summarized in blog posts on my website bjbutler. com. Okay, this episode is about email deliverability. I have a client that saw her email open rates go stably, they were stably around 40 percent for months, down to about 20 percent and that happened over the course of three months.

We took a close look at the content she was putting out and her messaging. Finally, I looked closer at email deliverability. This is something I was always aware of, but didn’t think it really played a big factor in us getting her message out to her audience. Let me first say what email deliverability is.

When you send an email, whether it’s from Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Hotmail, AOL, whatever email service provider you use, it is routed through several sets of servers and ends up at the recipient’s email service provider. Their email service provider decides what to do with it. They can send it through to your inbox, send it to their spam or junk folder, or decide to trash it.

And the recipient will never have any indication that the sender sent anything at all in the first place. They do that. The way that they do that determination happens in a black box. There are actually two black boxes. One has to do with some metadata attached to the email that is a security check.

This is called email authentication. If the email doesn’t match several sets of email standards, That will make it significantly less likely to end up in the recipient’s inbox. These email standards are called SPF, DKIM, and DMARC if you want to look them up. You really, you can, but you really don’t need to know exactly what they are unless you’re trying to make it look like you are sending email from someone who is not you, which I hope you’re not.

The other black box is the email service provider’s spam filter. If I didn’t say it earlier, email service provider examples are Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and so on. They each have their own criteria for what they consider to be spam and will send to the spam or junk folder. Or, if their algorithms think a message is really bad, they will just get rid of it.

Poof. It’s gone. No record of it. The sender won’t know that they destroyed it. The recipient will never know it was coming their way. So this is the change that happened in the spring of this year. Google and Yahoo announced plans back in fall of 23 for more stringent spam filtering starting in 2024.

Here are the biggest changes. Number one is email authentication. For those senders who send at least 5, 000 emails per day, they have to adhere to more robust authentication best practices. This is the authentication checks I spoke about a moment ago. They just got more strict. That way, recipients can be confident that each message that lands in their inbox is sent by the person it appears to be from.

Number two. One click unsubscribing. Recipients shouldn’t have to navigate through a maze to get off a sender’s mailing list. As such, the new Yahoo and Gmail spam filtering rules force bulk senders to send recipients the ability to opt out of email lists in one click. I think that’s actually welcome to most people.

Number three is honoring unsubscribes promptly. Being able to opt out of a list in a single click is one thing. But for that to matter, senders must actually honor those unsubscribe requests. The new rules force them to do exactly that. Remove folks who unsubscribe within 48 hours. I mean, often our email marketing platforms do this for us.

So, this really leads me to believe that these are just obvious improvements to make, and if you are a subscriber, out there trying to act in the best interest of those on your list. This is just not going to have an impact. Number four is low spam complaint rate. If you want to land in a prospect’s inbox, you need to craft compelling outbound sequences.

In the event tons of users flag your messages as spam, Gmail and Yahoo will make sure prospects never see your messages. The new spam filtering rules include a reduced spam rate threshold, that’s just 0. 3%, that users must stay under if they want to be considered a legitimate email sender. So out of all the emails that you send, less than 0.

3 percent of them are able to be marked as spam for you to keep a strong sender reputation. There’s a lot of nuances in here and things that these, all of my research online didn’t tell me, and you really have to infer it. As part of my background research for my client who had her email open rates drop in half, I spoke with two postmasters at two different prominent email marketing platforms.

First of all, earlier I mentioned Hotmail. They are an outlier. They are known in the industry to have the strictest spam filtering. It’s almost as if you have to have had a prior email conversation with someone to make it through their protections. And honestly, I have to say it takes even more than that.

I was interacting with a client of my client. She kept mentioning that she wasn’t getting my client’s emails that were marked as transactional. When you mark an email as transactional, it will be sent to a recipient, even if they have unsubscribed, as long as you still have their email address. Also, my client did have multiple correspondences with her via email, and she still wasn’t receiving my client’s emails.

It turns out, her email address that she was emailing from was at hotmail. com, and Hotmail’s overly strict filter was blocking the messages. They weren’t even ending up in spam. She said, she checked, they weren’t there. They were just being deleted. Wow, that was just a series of frustrating experiences.

The takeaway for all the spam filtering changes that happen in spring of this year is this. After you’ve checked that your email marketing platform has you set up correctly in their system, and you have it easy for recipients to unsubscribe, it comes down to this. Send more emails to the warmer people in your list, and less emails to those who are less likely to engage.

More to the warm, less to the cold. Google and Yahoo, they have a lot of data. They keep a sender reputation score for your domain. That means if your email address is you at your coaching business. com, it keeps a score for every email address that ends in at your coaching business. com. It keeps track of how many recipients open your email, click on a link, market a spam and complain.

They know everything, and they keep track of it. A lot of that data is not available to the email marketing platforms. I’m going to get to it in a second, but Google doesn’t always send it. If some users are using Apple mail, Apple mail, sending open read receipts for everything that comes their way. So it gets jumbled.

And just for reference, it used to be that the sender reputation score was by IP address, which means the IP address of your email marketing platform is what was being tracked. Google was keeping track of ConvertKit’s IP reputation, Entreport’s IP reputation. Starting in February of this year, we were on our own, we were being measured and judged based off of our own domain.

Google, at least, tells us what they know about us. If you are sending emails to more than 5, 000 people at a time or per day, you need to look at Google Postmaster Tools. Just Google it to get there. They tell you your overall domain reputation score and when you’ve had complaints. There’s more there, but that’s really what you need to become very familiar with.

Those complaints are a big one. Because Google doesn’t send that information back to the email marketing platforms anymore. If a recipient complains about your email, in Gmail, for example, this could be called, sometimes they’re called block this sender, report a spam, report as phishing, and so on. If they complain, Google doesn’t send that information back to the email marketing platforms anymore.

For one client, I use Entreport. There’s a column in the reporting section for complaints. It makes it look like Entreport would be able to tell me if a recipient complains. But that doesn’t include information from Google anymore. In this one client, 52 percent of her subscribers have Gmail addresses. So it’s missing a lot of data.

But back to what to actually do about deliverability is that you need to send more emails to warmer parts of your list and less emails to the colder subscribers. If you are seeing a drop in your email open rates and it started about February or March, it’s probably related to deliverability, assuming the quality of your content has stayed relatively constant.

The first place to go to confirm this is to use an email deliverability tool. I used GlockApps, and one of the postmasters I spoke with also confirmed that it’s a great tool. ClockApps gives you a set of email addresses to send a test email to. It will monitor where your messages end up in each of those email addresses, whether that’s inbox, spam, junk, undelivered altogether, which I’m almost offended by, that it just gets rid of my message, and, or, that it would get rid of anyone’s message and not, it just disappears.

But anyway, it’ll give you a score and break down where your message did well and then where it did not so well. Once you’ve confirmed that deliverability is your issue, here’s a two step approach on what to do. First is to have a ramped up approach to how warm or cold your audience is. For example, email one, send to your warmest audience.

Usually, warm is defined by when the last time they clicked on any email of yours. Remember, since we can’t really trust opens anymore because of Apple Mail, they send read receipts and they make it look like every email was open that goes to them. Most email marketing platforms have their own recommended way of measuring what’s warm and what’s cold.

Entreport uses last activity. It’s basically just when the subscriber clicked last. Email 1 should be sent to just those subscribers who have clicked in the last 30 days. 30 is up to you, but that’s a good place to start. Next, email 2 will go out to those who have clicked in the last 60 days. Email 3 goes to the last 90 days, and so on.

Exactly how far you go with that before you get to everyone is up to you to decide. A clear sign will be if you see an improvement in Google Postmaster Tools. After you go through that sequence, you’ll need to put in place a recurring sunset sequence. When subscribers become too cold, aka they haven’t interacted with your emails in a while, you want to re engage them with a message asking if they want to stay on your list.

You could have two of those emails and offer them an incentive to stay. And this incentive could just be the latest helpful content that you’ve been sending. If they still don’t click on anything, You got to let them go. You got to unsubscribe them. They’re just hurting your deliverability. That way, everyone on your list is always at least a little warm.

Then you can go back to sending every message to everyone on your list. The plan I just laid out is what I was able to put together after researching and talking to two different postmasters. It will probably be true for most of the coaches listening to this. At least it will be a very good guide to point you in the right direction.

If you’re looking for an email open rate pick me up, I can help. Schedule a free mini session at bjbutler. com and I’ll help get your email open rate back to where it needs to be so that your audience actually hears all the amazing ways you can help them. And they’re not just, your messages are not just being deleted along the way.

Alright, I’ll talk to you next week.

Hey, welcome back to the Life Coach Launchpad. My name’s BJ, and I’m here every week talking to you about all the online business things that, as it turns out, need to happen in order to have a successful life coaching business. I’m a business coach. I love to help life coaches make more money, get more clients, have more fun, and to do what they love to do, what they’re meant to do, and that’s coaching.

So let’s dive right in This is the third and final Part episode of the mini series of the outside business forces that can actually affect your life coaching business I’m going to start with the takeaways from this episode in the previous two episodes in this mini series on What are honestly the very few outside business forces that have had a significant change in?

My coaching business and that of my clients Really, there’s been three, three total in five years that I’ve been coaching and doing done for you services for my clients who are life coaches. The reason why I keep mentioning that it’s only three over five years is because there’s so much chatter and About Google search algorithm changes, social media algorithm changes, Facebook ad updates, and so on.

All of those really are just blips in the grand scheme of what you as a life coach need to be doing at all times. Your goal should be to further understand the challenges your potential clients are going through and offer advice, tools, information that can help them. All the algorithms are actually geared to help you get through to them if you are actually trying to help.

The first episode, it was, so that was two episodes ago, was about when Apple changed which podcast episodes it downloads. Net, there was a significant drop in podcast downloads. Back in the fall of 2023 across the board, the second episode in this mini series, which was the one right before this was about when Apple mail started sending information back to the email marketing softwares saying that every email that went through it was opened, whether it was opened by the user or not the net result.

Is that everyone saw their email open rates go way up. I was working with a client at the time that saw her open rates double in one month. Double. At first it sounded great. But then we learned more and it just wasn’t what we thought it was. If either of those situations are new to you, go back and listen to the episodes immediately before this one and two before this one.

I also have the information summarized in blog posts on my website bjbutler. com. Okay, this episode is about email deliverability. I have a client that saw her email open rates go stably, they were stably around 40 percent for months, down to about 20 percent and that happened over the course of three months.

We took a close look at the content she was putting out and her messaging. Finally, I looked closer at email deliverability. This is something I was always aware of, but didn’t think it really played a big factor in us getting her message out to her audience. Let me first say what email deliverability is.

When you send an email, whether it’s from Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Hotmail, AOL, whatever email service provider you use, it is routed through several sets of servers and ends up at the recipient’s email service provider. Their email service provider decides what to do with it. They can send it through to your inbox, send it to their spam or junk folder, or decide to trash it.

And the recipient will never have any indication that the sender sent anything at all in the first place. They do that. The way that they do that determination happens in a black box. There are actually two black boxes. One has to do with some metadata attached to the email that is a security check.

This is called email authentication. If the email doesn’t match several sets of email standards, That will make it significantly less likely to end up in the recipient’s inbox. These email standards are called SPF, DKIM, and DMARC if you want to look them up. You really, you can, but you really don’t need to know exactly what they are unless you’re trying to make it look like you are sending email from someone who is not you, which I hope you’re not.

The other black box is the email service provider’s spam filter. If I didn’t say it earlier, email service provider examples are Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and so on. They each have their own criteria for what they consider to be spam and will send to the spam or junk folder. Or, if their algorithms think a message is really bad, they will just get rid of it.

Poof. It’s gone. No record of it. The sender won’t know that they destroyed it. The recipient will never know it was coming their way. So this is the change that happened in the spring of this year. Google and Yahoo announced plans back in fall of 23 for more stringent spam filtering starting in 2024.

Here are the biggest changes. Number one is email authentication. For those senders who send at least 5, 000 emails per day, they have to adhere to more robust authentication best practices. This is the authentication checks I spoke about a moment ago. They just got more strict. That way, recipients can be confident that each message that lands in their inbox is sent by the person it appears to be from.

Number two. One click unsubscribing. Recipients shouldn’t have to navigate through a maze to get off a sender’s mailing list. As such, the new Yahoo and Gmail spam filtering rules force bulk senders to send recipients the ability to opt out of email lists in one click. I think that’s actually welcome to most people.

Number three is honoring unsubscribes promptly. Being able to opt out of a list in a single click is one thing. But for that to matter, senders must actually honor those unsubscribe requests. The new rules force them to do exactly that. Remove folks who unsubscribe within 48 hours. I mean, often our email marketing platforms do this for us.

So, this really leads me to believe that these are just obvious improvements to make, and if you are a subscriber, out there trying to act in the best interest of those on your list. This is just not going to have an impact. Number four is low spam complaint rate. If you want to land in a prospect’s inbox, you need to craft compelling outbound sequences.

In the event tons of users flag your messages as spam, Gmail and Yahoo will make sure prospects never see your messages. The new spam filtering rules include a reduced spam rate threshold, that’s just 0. 3%, that users must stay under if they want to be considered a legitimate email sender. So out of all the emails that you send, less than 0.

3 percent of them are able to be marked as spam for you to keep a strong sender reputation. There’s a lot of nuances in here and things that these, all of my research online didn’t tell me, and you really have to infer it. As part of my background research for my client who had her email open rates drop in half, I spoke with two postmasters at two different prominent email marketing platforms.

First of all, earlier I mentioned Hotmail. They are an outlier. They are known in the industry to have the strictest spam filtering. It’s almost as if you have to have had a prior email conversation with someone to make it through their protections. And honestly, I have to say it takes even more than that.

I was interacting with a client of my client. She kept mentioning that she wasn’t getting my client’s emails that were marked as transactional. When you mark an email as transactional, it will be sent to a recipient, even if they have unsubscribed, as long as you still have their email address. Also, my client did have multiple correspondences with her via email, and she still wasn’t receiving my client’s emails.

It turns out, her email address that she was emailing from was at hotmail. com, and Hotmail’s overly strict filter was blocking the messages. They weren’t even ending up in spam. She said, she checked, they weren’t there. They were just being deleted. Wow, that was just a series of frustrating experiences.

The takeaway for all the spam filtering changes that happen in spring of this year is this. After you’ve checked that your email marketing platform has you set up correctly in their system, and you have it easy for recipients to unsubscribe, it comes down to this. Send more emails to the warmer people in your list, and less emails to those who are less likely to engage.

More to the warm, less to the cold. Google and Yahoo, they have a lot of data. They keep a sender reputation score for your domain. That means if your email address is you at your coaching business. com, it keeps a score for every email address that ends in at your coaching business. com. It keeps track of how many recipients open your email, click on a link, market a spam and complain.

They know everything, and they keep track of it. A lot of that data is not available to the email marketing platforms. I’m going to get to it in a second, but Google doesn’t always send it. If some users are using Apple mail, Apple mail, sending open read receipts for everything that comes their way. So it gets jumbled.

And just for reference, it used to be that the sender reputation score was by IP address, which means the IP address of your email marketing platform is what was being tracked. Google was keeping track of ConvertKit’s IP reputation, Entreport’s IP reputation. Starting in February of this year, we were on our own, we were being measured and judged based off of our own domain.

Google, at least, tells us what they know about us. If you are sending emails to more than 5, 000 people at a time or per day, you need to look at Google Postmaster Tools. Just Google it to get there. They tell you your overall domain reputation score and when you’ve had complaints. There’s more there, but that’s really what you need to become very familiar with.

Those complaints are a big one. Because Google doesn’t send that information back to the email marketing platforms anymore. If a recipient complains about your email, in Gmail, for example, this could be called, sometimes they’re called block this sender, report a spam, report as phishing, and so on. If they complain, Google doesn’t send that information back to the email marketing platforms anymore.

For one client, I use Entreport. There’s a column in the reporting section for complaints. It makes it look like Entreport would be able to tell me if a recipient complains. But that doesn’t include information from Google anymore. In this one client, 52 percent of her subscribers have Gmail addresses. So it’s missing a lot of data.

But back to what to actually do about deliverability is that you need to send more emails to warmer parts of your list and less emails to the colder subscribers. If you are seeing a drop in your email open rates and it started about February or March, it’s probably related to deliverability, assuming the quality of your content has stayed relatively constant.

The first place to go to confirm this is to use an email deliverability tool. I used GlockApps, and one of the postmasters I spoke with also confirmed that it’s a great tool. ClockApps gives you a set of email addresses to send a test email to. It will monitor where your messages end up in each of those email addresses, whether that’s inbox, spam, junk, undelivered altogether, which I’m almost offended by, that it just gets rid of my message, and, or, that it would get rid of anyone’s message and not, it just disappears.

But anyway, it’ll give you a score and break down where your message did well and then where it did not so well. Once you’ve confirmed that deliverability is your issue, here’s a two step approach on what to do. First is to have a ramped up approach to how warm or cold your audience is. For example, email one, send to your warmest audience.

Usually, warm is defined by when the last time they clicked on any email of yours. Remember, since we can’t really trust opens anymore because of Apple Mail, they send read receipts and they make it look like every email was open that goes to them. Most email marketing platforms have their own recommended way of measuring what’s warm and what’s cold.

Entreport uses last activity. It’s basically just when the subscriber clicked last. Email 1 should be sent to just those subscribers who have clicked in the last 30 days. 30 is up to you, but that’s a good place to start. Next, email 2 will go out to those who have clicked in the last 60 days. Email 3 goes to the last 90 days, and so on.

Exactly how far you go with that before you get to everyone is up to you to decide. A clear sign will be if you see an improvement in Google Postmaster Tools. After you go through that sequence, you’ll need to put in place a recurring sunset sequence. When subscribers become too cold, aka they haven’t interacted with your emails in a while, you want to re engage them with a message asking if they want to stay on your list.

You could have two of those emails and offer them an incentive to stay. And this incentive could just be the latest helpful content that you’ve been sending. If they still don’t click on anything, You got to let them go. You got to unsubscribe them. They’re just hurting your deliverability. That way, everyone on your list is always at least a little warm.

Then you can go back to sending every message to everyone on your list. The plan I just laid out is what I was able to put together after researching and talking to two different postmasters. It will probably be true for most of the coaches listening to this. At least it will be a very good guide to point you in the right direction.

If you’re looking for an email open rate pick me up, I can help. Schedule a free mini session at bjbutler. com and I’ll help get your email open rate back to where it needs to be so that your audience actually hears all the amazing ways you can help them. And they’re not just, your messages are not just being deleted along the way.

Alright, I’ll talk to you next week.